The European Space Agency's Planck satellite, dedicated to studying the early Universe and its subsequent evolution, was launched 14 May 2009 and has been scanning the microwave and submillimetre sky continuously since 12 August 2009. In March 2013, ESA and the Planck Collaboration released the initial cosmology products based on the first 15.5 months of Planck data, along with a set of scientific and technical papers and a web-based explanatory supplement. This paper gives an overview of the mission and its performance, the processing, analysis, and characteristics of the data, the scientific results, and the science data products and papers in the release. The science products include maps of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) and diffuse extragalactic foregrounds, a catalogue of compact Galactic and extragalactic sources, and a list of sources detected through the Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect. The likelihood code used to assess cosmological models against the Planck data and a lensing likelihood are described. Scientific results include robust support for the standard six-parameter ΛCDM model of cosmology and improved measurements of its parameters, including a highly significant deviation from scale invariance of the primordial power spectrum. The Planck values for these parameters and others derived from them are significantly different from those previously determined. Several large-scale anomalies in the temperature distribution of the CMB, first detected by WMAP, are confirmed with higher confidence. Planck sets new limits on the number and mass of neutrinos, and has measured gravitational lensing of CMB anisotropies at greater than 25σ. Planck finds no evidence for non-Gaussianity in the CMB. Planck's results agree well with results from the measurements of baryon acoustic oscillations. Planck finds a lower Hubble constant than found in some more local measures. Some tension is also present between the amplitude of matter fluctuations (σ 8 ) derived from CMB data and that derived from Sunyaev-Zeldovich data. The Planck and WMAP power spectra are offset from each other by an average level of about 2% around the first acoustic peak. Analysis of Planck polarization data is not yet mature, therefore polarization results are not released, although the robust detection of E-mode polarization around CMB hot and cold spots is shown graphically.

If the accelerated expansion of the Universe at the present epoch is driven by a dark energy scalar field, there may well be a non-trivial coupling between the dark energy and the cold dark matter (CDM) fluid. Such interactions give rise to new features in cosmological structure growth, like an additional long-range attractive force between CDM particles, or variations of the dark matter particle mass with time. We have implemented these effects in the N-body code GADGET-2 and present results of a series of high-resolution N-body simulations where the dark energy component is directly interacting with the CDM. As a consequence of the new physics, CDM and baryon distributions evolve differently both in the linear and in the nonlinear regime of structure formation. Already on large scales, a linear bias develops between these two components, which is further enhanced by the non-linear evolution. We also find, in contrast with previous work, that the density profiles of CDM haloes are less concentrated in coupled dark energy cosmologies compared with CDM, and that this feature does not depend on the initial conditions setup, but is a specific consequence of the extra physics induced by the coupling. Also, the baryon fraction in haloes in the coupled models is significantly reduced below the universal baryon fraction. These features alleviate tensions between observations and the CDM model on small scales. Our methodology is ideally suited to explore the predictions of coupled dark energy models in the fully non-linear regime, which can provide powerful constraints for the viable parameter space of such scenarios.

We propose a novel parameterization of the dark energy density. It is particularly well suited to describe a non-negligible contribution of dark energy at early times and contains only three parameters, which are all physically meaningful: the fractional dark energy density today, the equation of state today and the fractional dark energy density at early times. As we parameterize Ω d (a) directly instead of the equation of state, we can give analytic expressions for the Hubble parameter, the conformal horizon today and at last scattering, the sound horizon at last scattering, the acoustic scale as well as the luminosity distance. For an equation of state today w0 < −1, our model crosses the cosmological constant boundary. We perform numerical studies to constrain the parameters of our model by using Cosmic Microwave Background, Large Scale Structure and Supernovae Ia data. At 95% confidence, we find that the fractional dark energy density at early times Ω e d < 0.06. This bound tightens considerably to Ω e d < 0.04 when the latest Boomerang data is included. We find that both the gold sample of Riess et. al. and the SNLS data of Astier et. al. when combined with CMB and LSS data mildly prefer w0 < −1, but are well compatible with a cosmological constant.

We aim to summarize the current state of knowledge regarding Galactic Faraday rotation in an all-sky map of the Galactic Faraday depth. For this we have assembled the most extensive catalog of Faraday rotation data of compact extragalactic polarized radio sources to date. In the map-making procedure we used a recently developed algorithm that reconstructs the map and the power spectrum of a statistically isotropic and homogeneous field while taking into account uncertainties in the noise statistics. This procedure is able to identify some rotation angles that are offset by an integer multiple of π. The resulting map can be seen as an improved version of earlier such maps and is made publicly available, along with a map of its uncertainty. For the angular power spectrum we find a power law behavior C ∝ −2.17 for a Faraday sky where an overall variance profile as a function of Galactic latitude has been removed, in agreement with earlier work. We show that this is in accordance with a 3D Fourier power spectrum P(k) ∝ k −2.17 of the underlying field n e B r under simplifying geometrical and statistical assumptions.

We present a first application of the recently proposed LITMUS test for magnetic helicity, as well as a thorough study of its applicability under different circumstances. In order to apply this test to the galactic magnetic field, the newly developed critical filter formalism is used to produce an all-sky map of the Faraday depth. The test does not detect helicity in the galactic magnetic field. To understand the significance of this finding, we made an applicability study, showing that a definite conclusion about the absence of magnetic helicity in the galactic field has not yet been reached. This study is conducted by applying the test to simulated observational data. We consider simulations in a flat sky approximation and all-sky simulations, both with assumptions of constant electron densities and realistic distributions of thermal and cosmic ray electrons. Our results suggest that the LITMUS test does indeed perform very well in cases where constant electron densities can be assumed, both in the flat-sky limit and in the galactic setting. Non-trivial distributions of thermal and cosmic ray electrons, however, may complicate the scenario to the point where helicity in the magnetic field can escape detection.